Eighty years ago on this day, William Butler Yeats transitioned from the earthly realm to wherever mystic poets go when they die. He was in the south of France at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour in Roquebrune Cap Martin, kept company by both his wife George and his last mistress, Edith Shackleton Heald. His friends had taken up a collection to help him move there.
Yeats completed Cuchulain Comforted in the last fifteen days of his life, a poem Seamus Heaney referred to as “one of the greatest ever death-bed utterances.†He completed his last play, The Death of Cuchulain, just before New Years’ day. And he handed over the manuscript of two poems, Are You Content? and The Spirit Medium to his mistress as he lay dying.
He asked George to bury him at the local cemetery in Roquebrune and expressed a wish that after a year’s time she arrange to have him dug up and his body moved to Sligo. Unfortunately, due to an unfortunate combination of misconstrued burial instructions and the beginning of World War II, the poet’s wishes were not carried out as planned. Somehow, he wound up in a pauper’s grave with many other bodies. Because he wore a leather truss for a hernia, they thought they might be able to identify his body, and so in 1948 the attempt was made. And this is where things get even more muddled. An English gentleman, Alfred Hollis, who wore a surgical steel corset for his spine died two weeks after Yeats and was interred in the same plot. A body wearing a medical device was exhumed by French authorities. This body was conveyed with great honor to Galway harbor. Friends and family measured and examined the bones and insisted it was Yeats. But who is in Yeats’ tomb? To this day some say an Englishman resides in it—but both the Yeats and Hollis families found the whole thing so painful they decided to leave things as they were.
I would refer you to this fine article from The Irish Times, written on the 75th anniversary of Yeats’ death and from which I gleaned this information—and so much more. A great read.
You can read the entire Cuchulain Comforted here.
They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words,
Though all was done in common as before;
They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.
